The search for sanity in the Middle East is beginning to resemble some demented and deadly gavotte. The parties advance and retreat in time to the sounds of battle, pausing at intervals to bow in the direction of peace.

They are bowing now. Israel has pulled its troops out of areas supposedly controlled by the Palestinian National Authority. The Palestinians are cooperating with Israeli and American security officials.

The immediate objective is modest. It is to revive proposals for a lasting ceasefire, first made by CIA director George Tenet last June.

The Tenet plan was itself an attempt to breathe life into another, more ambitious set of proposals from US envoy George Mitchell. And the Mitchell plan, in turn, was intended to revive the more general peace process.

It is now nearly nine years since Yasser Arafat and the then Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, astonished the world with their interim peace agreement, following months of secret talks in Norway.

The Oslo accords, as they became known, were complex and studded with potential sticking points.

But at their heart was a simple proposition: that Yasser Arafat, in return for recognising the Jewish state, would get a country of his own. The Palestinians would gradually take control of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the territories Israel seized from Jordan and Egypt respectively in the Six Day War of 1967.

All the really difficult issues - final borders, the fate of four million Palestinian refugees, the Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, and the future of Jerusalem - were put on the back burner during the early phases of the peace process.

In the summer of 2000, after seven long years of wrangling and mutual recrimination, the Israelis and Palestinians came nail-bitingly close to signing a permanent peace settlement. All subsequent attempts to revive the Oslo process have been blown away by the steadily escalating violence of the Palestinian uprising, or intifada, which erupted in September 2000.

Through all the 18 months of bloodshed, Israeli leaders have insisted that they will never negotiate under fire, and that if the Palestinians want to talk, they must first take decisive action against militant groups, both Islamist and secular. The Palestinians, no less adamantly, say that the militants have been provoked by Israeli intransigence and aggression, and that only a political settlement can end the violence.

Since George Bush took over the White House, America's voice in the region has been unusually muted. President Bill Clinton had strained every sinew to oversee a peace settlement, but his successor has shown little taste for the byzantine ways of the region.

There are signs, however, that the US is beginning again to flex its diplomatic muscles. President Bush and his deputy, Dick Cheney, have gone even further than Clinton in declaring their preference for a two-state solution, with a free Palestine existing alongside Israel. The vice president said it again in Jerusalem today.

But in lifting its gaze to the distant horizon of permanent peace, the US is not losing sight of what is needed right now to prevent outright war. That is where the Mitchell and Tenet plans come in. They are both designed, in very similar ways, to create the circumstances in which negotiations may resume - in other words, a ceasefire.

The Tenet plan is the latest, although it is already nine months old. It is based on the urgent need for an immediate ceasefire, to be bolstered by regular meetings of high level Israeli, Palestinian and US security officials. (So eager was Washington to see the Tenet plan taken up, that it offered to supply sophisticated video conferencing systems to encourage frequent and effective dialogue).

In two crucial respects Tenet's proposals have failed dismally. He wanted the Palestinian authorities to take immediate action against militant groups, and the Israeli authorities to refrain from attacking any of the PNA's police and other security installations.

The first has manifestly failed to happen; the second is happening almost daily. George Tenet's intervention in the Middle East came just three months after another special envoy, George Mitchell, reported as chairman of an international mission.

Mr Mitchell, who played a central role in the negotiations which led to the Good Friday peace agreement in Northern Ireland, had a rather broader brief. As well as a ceasefire, his group urged both sides to implement confidence building measures, including a complete freeze on new Jewish settlement in the occupied territories, and to reaffirm their belief in a negotiated permanent peace agreement.

Both the Tenet and Mitchell proposals are essentially tactical in nature, being about means to an end. All but the most intransigent elements on both sides know what that end should and no doubt will be: the establishment of a Palestinian state on Arab lands captured by Israel in 1967.

That has been the strategic aim of the main players for the best part of a decade. It is the underpinning of the Oslo accord, and it is the central idea in the very latest peace plan to be mooted, by Saudia Arabian crown prince Abdullah.

The dismal fact is that although everyone knows where they are heading, nobody seems to know exactly how to get there. So instead of marching forward together, they are dancing to the deadly music of gunfire.